


to the sticking place

by TolkienGirl



Category: Macbeth - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, F/M, Gen, Suicide, a twisted story of ambition and bloodlust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-19
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-06-03 04:45:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6597259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You grow up in a third-story flat, where the grime sticks like paint to the walls. It never comes out, no matter how hard you try to wash it clean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to the sticking place

You grow up in a third-story flat, where the grime sticks like paint to the walls. It never comes out, no matter how hard you try to wash it clean.

Your shoes pinch and your sleeves are tattered at the edges where you pull at them with nervous fingers.

The other children mock you, you with your pale skin and flat dark hair.

Other girls might cry. Other girls might run away.

You stand still, and hate them.

 

You're pretty enough for certain kinds of work, but you'd rather die.

You're a janitor, a common maid. You scrub floors and windows and grimy walls, just like the walls you grew up in, and you hate the man who signs your paychecks and the women who smile at you with pity behind their teeth.

You will be free of this. You. You will find a way out.

You would kill a king if you had to.

 

He is rich enough, tall enough, with a soft face and hungry eyes.

Not perfect, you think, but he could be.

You spent every penny you had on a dress, red as an artery, and you won't leave without a prize.

He falls in love, and you let him.

 

Rich becomes richer, yet also (somehow) _not quite rich enough_.

He doesn't understand. God, but they lack ambition—the ones who never knew what it was like to see pity scratched like a wound across the faces all around them.

He may lack ambition, but you do not. There must be _nothing_ that you lack.

 

The first time you kill, you get what you want. But sin is greedy, and you take more than you wanted.

"Where were you, last night?" he asks, heavy with sleep in the morning, and you cannot tell him.

There is only the faintest memory of urgency. You look down at your hands and see that they are reddened with too much washing.

(Too much? Because then again—who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?)

 

All the riches you have gained cannot buy a soft-faced man a lion's brutal heart. He was happy with his second-rate expensive cars, with clothes that did not scream their worth.

You want everything to scream.

 

They come for you, in the end. You can hear the gunfire and that thick, stomach-roiling splatter that can only be blood.

You slide your feet out of your blade-like, glittering heels and rest them flat on the floorboards. It is all dull around you, except for the spot of grime on your bedroom wall.

_Out, damned spot_ , you think, but you think it very wearily. It follows you, wherever you go.

You lacked not for ambition. Let them never say that. If you fell short, it was only because none of the rest of them would take a dagger to the hand as easily as to the heart.

But you—you've always been filled, top to toe, with the direst cruelty. And of that, at least, you are very, very proud.

You put a bullet in your brain before anyone else can.


End file.
